Many people outside of “the process” do not realize that Florida’s legislature is a part-time body. As most readers of this post will know, Florida’s lawmakers are “citizen legislators” who hold regular jobs outside of the Capitol.

What jobs are typical of legislators? Do professional differences exist between the parties? Does the House or Senate have more lawyers? We scraped data from the Clerk’s manual, categorized the jobs listed by industry, and found some interesting items.

- The top three overall fields represented in the legislature are legal, business and real estate.

- 1 in 4 legislators are lawyers and they account for 32% of Democrats and 23% of Republicans.

- Business people comprise 20% of the Republican Caucus but only 9% of the Democratic Caucus.

- Each party has six members who come from education related fields.

Explore the interactive chart below where you can hover over any area for more info and filter using the drop downs. To see full details (member name, occupation, etc) simply click “Show Data” icon in the mouse over box.

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About Decision MediaWorks

Decision MediaWorks

Decision MediaWorks specializes in turning data into insight. We use the latest in data science to bring clarity to the hard choices made by anyone who follows Florida's unique politics, public policy and culture.

Our focus is on delivering insights that make sense out of publicly available data. We believe the success of any data science project rests on the ability to clearly communicate insights to decision makers.

Questions answered. Tough decisions made easier. That's what we do.

About Joe Clements

Joe Clements, President

Joe's first foray in analytics was estimating the amount of carbon stored in one acre of Ethiopian scrub brush as an intern for the United Nations World Food Programme.

After working for several years in political campaigns and as a legislative staffer, Joe saw that decision making is hard but that good data science (and the presentation of data) can make many decisions easier.

Joe was a Truman and Rhodes scholar nominee at the University of North Florida where he graduated with a degree in public relations. He is currently completing graduate coursework in political management and computer science at Florida State University.

In his non-data science life, Joe is married to Sara, fosters dogs, shoots guns, never misses a Jacksonville Jaguars game and tries to play golf.